The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [173]
“Syndrome?” she asked.
He looked over at the children, frozen in mid-stride. They often played a game to see which one could be the most statue-like.
“The Dear Leader has read of a syndrome, and he believes that if he keeps a certain woman imprisoned long enough, she will come to love him.”
“A certain woman?” Sun Moon asked.
“It’s not important who she is,” he said. “All that matters is that she’s American. A delegation is coming for her, and if the Dear Leader doesn’t hand her over, our plan is ruined.”
“You said she was a captive. What—is she in a cage or a prison? How long has this been going on?”
“She’s in his private bunker. She was going around the world but had a problem on her boat. They plucked her out of the sea, and now the Dear Leader’s infatuated with her. He goes down there at night and plays her operas composed in his honor. He wants to keep her down deep until she develops feelings for him. Have you ever heard of anything like this? Tell me there’s no such thing.”
Sun Moon was quiet a moment. Then she said, “What if a woman had to sleep in the same bed as her captor?”
Ga eyed her to see what she was getting at.
Sun Moon said, “What if she depended on her captor for every necessity—food, cigarettes, clothes—and he could indulge or deprive her at his whim?”
She looked at him as though she truly wanted an answer, but he could only wonder if she was speaking of himself or his predecessor.
“What if a woman had children with her captor?”
Ga took the ladle from her hands and drew water for the boy and the girl, but they were now assuming the poses of the hammer and sickle bearers on the frieze of the Party Foundation Monument, and even the heat of the day could not make them break from their personas.
“That man is gone,” he said. “I’m here now. I’m not your captor. I’m liberating you. It’s easy to talk about prisoners, but I’m the one trying to get you to say the word ‘escape.’ That’s what the Dear Leader’s captive wants. She might be locked in a cell, but her heart is restless. She will leap at the chance to get out, trust me.”
“You sound like you know her,” Sun Moon said.
“There was a time,” he told her. “It seems like another life. I had a job transcribing radio transmissions on the sea. I listened from sunset to sunrise, and in the darkest hour, I’d hear her, the Girl Rower. She and her friend were rowing around the world, but this one, she was the one that rowed all night, without the horizon to steer toward or the sun to mark her progress. She was forever bound to the other rower, yet completely alone. She labored forward solely on duty, her body bowing to the oars, but her mind, the broadcasts she made, never had a woman sounded so free.”
Sun Moon cocked her head and tried on those words. “Forever bound to another,” she whispered. “Yet totally alone,” she added in self-reflection.
“Is that how you want to live?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Are you ready to talk about the plan?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Just remember, forever bound yet alone—that could be a good thing. If for some reason we ended up separated, if somehow we didn’t get out together, we could be bound, even if we weren’t together.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “There will be no alone. That’s not how it’s going to go.”
“What if something goes wrong, what if in getting the three of you out, I am left behind?”
“Oh no,” she said. “There is going to be none of that. I need you. I don’t speak English, I don’t know where to go, I don’t know which Americans are informants and which are not. We’re not going around the world with just the clothes on our backs.”
“Believe me—if something went wrong, I’d eventually join you. Somehow I’d make it. And you wouldn’t be alone. The Senator’s wife would help you until I made my way to you.”
“I don’t need someone’s wife,” she told him. “I need you. It’s you I must have. You don’t understand what my life has been like, how I’ve been baited and tricked before.”
“You must believe me that I’ll follow,” Ga said.